The Progressive Era document outlines the key issues, goals, and reforms of the Progressive movement between the 1890s to 1920s. It aimed to address unsafe working conditions, the power of large corporations, and unresponsive government. The goals were to protect social welfare through organizations like the YMCA and Salvation Army, promote moral reform like prohibition, create economic reforms to challenge capitalism, and foster efficiency in industry and government. Reforms focused on muckraking journalism, direct election of senators, and initiatives to give citizens more voice, while also addressing issues like women's suffrage.

1. The Progressive Era

2. Issues of The Progressive Era
• Journalists and writers
exposed the unsafe
conditions often faced by
factory workers, including
women and children
• Intellectuals questioned the
dominant role of large
corporations in American
society
• Political reformers struggled
to make government more
responsive to the people
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
exposed the meat industry

3. A Definition of the Progressive
Movement
• These reform efforts
formed the progressive
movement, which aimed
to return control of the
government to the
people, restore
economic opportunity,
and correct injustices in
American life

4. Four Goals of Progressivism:
• Protecting the social welfare
• Promoting moral improvement
• Creating economic reform
• Fostering efficiency

5. Social Welfare:
• The Social Gospel and
settlement house movements
aimed to help the poor
through community centers,
churches, and social services
• The Young Men’s Christian
Association (YMCA) opened
libraries, sponsored classes,
and built swimming pools

6. Social Welfare:
• The Salvation Army fed the poor
people in soup kitchens, cared for
children in nurseries, and sent
“slum brigades” to instruct poor
immigrants in middle-class values
of hard work and temperance
• Florence Kelley became an
advocate for improving the lives of
women and children, and would
help pass the Illinois Factory Act in
1893, which limited women’s
working hours and prohibited child
labor

7. Promoting Moral Improvement:
• Prohibition, banning of
alcoholic beverages, became
a focal point to the fear that
alcohol was undermining
American morals
• The Women’s Christian
Temperance Union (WCTU)
spearheaded the crusade for
prohibition

8. Creating Economic Reform:
• The economic panic of 1893
prompted some Americans to
question the capitalist
economic system
• Some Americans, especially
workers, embraced socialism
• Socialism addressed the
problems with the uneven
balance among big business,
government, and ordinary
people

9. Creating Economic Reform:
• Big business often received
favorable treatment from
government officials and
politicians
• Journalists during the
progressive movement wrote
about the corrupt side of
business and public life in
mass circulation magazines
during the early 20th century
• These journalists became
known as muckrakers

10. Fostering Efficiency:
• Many progressive leaders put their faith in
experts and scientific principles to make
society and the workplace more efficient
• Many industry reformers applied scientific
management studies to see just how quickly
each task could be performed
• Such efforts at improving efficiency targeted
not only industry, but government as well

11. Cleaning up Local Government:
• Reforming elections, the
adoption of the secret
ballot, the initiative, the
referendum, and the
recall
• The initiative and
referendum gave citizens
the power to create laws

12. Cleaning up Local Government
• Citizens could petition to place an initiative, a
bill originated by the people rather than
lawmakers-on the ballot
• Then voters, instead of the legislature,
accepted or rejected the initiative by
referendum, a vote on the initiative
• The recall enabled voters to remove public
officials from elected positions by forcing
them to face another election before the end
of their term if enough voters asked for it

13. Direct Election of Senators:
• Before 1913, each state’s
legislature had chosen its
own U.S. senator, which
put even more power into
the hands of party bosses
and wealthy corporations
• The Seventeenth
Amendment in 1912
made direct election of
senators the law of the
land
Cartoon portraying the time needed to
pass the 17th Amendment allowing
the direct election of U.S. senators

14. The Issue of Women Suffrage
• Government reform-
including efforts to give
Americans more of a voice
in electing their legislators
and creating laws-drew
increased numbers of
women into public life. It
also focused renewed
attention on the issue of
women suffrage.